Behind The Hustle: Katrina Torres
I hear privately from many of you.
Some of you don’t have a lot of people in your corner rooting for you.
Worse, some of you have people who actually are rooting for your failure.
Who criticize. Who laugh. Who give a demeaning pat on the back. Who suck in air through their teeth when you finally get the courage to share your plans for working your butt off to build an income on your own terms.
They sit back, eating their popcorn, chuckle loaded in the barrel, just waiting for you to make a mistake.
But I am here to tell you, that person doesn’t count.
Teddy Roosevelt said it best.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
~The Man in the Arena, by Theodore Roosevelt
Now, I am not going to paint an overly rosy picture of entrepreneurship. Honestly, most businesses fail. There is a reason most people work for a company instead of running their own business.
To be successful, you likely will need to hear some critical feedback many times from people who are wiser and more experienced and more successful than you.
It is a mark of maturity to solicit and heed wise feedback, even when it hurts to hear.
But don’t let criticism from a cold and timid soul who has never been in the arena be what stops you from trying.
The cold and timid soul does not get a audience with you.
Listen to those who have dusty faces because they have dared.
Thanks so much to Digits who made this edition possible.
Will you migrate any clients to Digits? Or perhaps offer to set up a brand new business on Digits?
Digits even has daily office hours for accounting pros to make sure you have the support needed to speed through the learning curve. That sounds like an arena (ok, a Zoom Room) full of dusty accounting faces.
Sign up for a free Digits accountant portal, play around with the demo company, and lean hard on their onboarding team to learn this General Ledger tool.
💰 Veronica Wasek has officially shipped her updates to her QBO Cleanup Course*. That means it is the most up-to-date cleanup course on the market right now. She has provided our community with a 15% discount. 26cleanup15. Expires May 31. There are payment plans available.
Remember, even one cleanup client pays for a course like this. And then you get to do cleanups over and over and over.
💰 Tax-Ready Books System* is $800 off with code TRBlaunch800. That discount makes it an extremely low price. Through May 31.
💰 Through May 31, Puzzle is offering anyone who books a demo a $100 Amazon gift card.
💰 XeroCon tickets are still on sale through May 31. 20% off. Denver is lovely in the summer.
Please always send me any news of deals that you hear of that others might benefit from.
Items with a “+” are hosted by me. All these events can be viewed and registered for in the DESCRIPTIONS of each event on the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Calendar.
📅 May 28, and June 3: Three-part webinar series covering durable AI-skills, firm-wide adoption strategy, and hands on GPT-training. Sign up for the next 2 sessions even if you missed the first.
May 28 | From testing to standard practice: AI adoption for firm leaders
June 3 | Building your first custom GPT: a hands-on training session
📅+June 3: Behind The Hustle: Valerie Armstrong. Subscribe to the YouTube channel so you don’t miss it.
📅 June 3, 9, and 11: Building a Modern Accounting Practice with Xero. Y’all, Xero is having 3 FREE gatherings this summer. Get yourself to one! (This is different that XeroCon, that I mentioned above in the Deals section)
June 3 | New York City
June 9 | Denver
June 11 | Dallas
📅 June 30: QuickBooks ProAdvisor Level 1 and Level 2 recertification deadline. Here are two resources to help you pass those exams quickly.
Alicia Katz Pollock and Matthew Fulton breaking it down on YouTube.
QBO Recertification Made Simple* from Akadian (reach out if you want our community’s evergreen discount code for Akadian courses)
Subscribe to the YouTube Channel
🌶️ Mary Ann R. needs to increase her prices and is feeling very stressed over it. She knows her price of $60 per hour for her first 2 large clients was way too low, but she doesn’t know how to adjust now.
🌶️ Have we reached “peak bookkeeping business guru”? 🫠 When Alex Hormozi is running ads for courses about how to run a bookkeeping business or tax business, it makes me want to burn the whole internet down. I think if you want to build a bookkeeping business, you should learn from someone who has built (or better yet, is building) a successful bookkeeping business.
You can get feedback from me and from the folks in the Bookkeeping Side Hustle community about any programs you are thinking of investing in. Just ask!
Great discussion with Digits about their recent 2026 updates. It is free for accounting pros to use Digits to serve their clients. Take a peek here.
We also took our live stream conversation it a bit high level and chatted about some of the open questions about AI that we are all facing. AI is coming for us. So do we take an approach where we are bolting on AI tools on top of other legacy ledger tools or do we build our firm from the ground up on top of AI native software.
You can also watch the original basic demo here (or just sign up for your free account and ask for a private demo, y’all).
💪 Katrina Torres was the latest in the hotseat on the Behind The Hustle show.
She was the first guest to say her first client came from the QuickBooks ProAdvisor directory.
I knew I had to interview her when I met her at Scaling New Heights last year and she told me that she had just had military movers pack up all her stuff in Virginia, then she came to Florida for a conference, and then she was taking a month to drive her family from the conference to their new home in Nevada. That is taking what life throws at you and not letting it slow you down at all. I love that steely kind of lady.
💪 Still time to join the list to get priority access to the new bookkeeping software called Clean Books. Go be an early adopter and push it to the extreme and help shape it.
💪 The Accounting Cornerstone Foundation really, really, really does give away all-expenses paid scholarships for bookkeeping (and tax folks, too) to attend their very first accounting conference. The last one of the year is going to be XeroCon. You should apply! Applications close June 1! (Hint…there are not very many applicants for this conference yet!)
Apply right here 👉 https://accountingcornerstone.org/apply/
💼 Be sure to check the Job Guide to see what jobs were posted in the Facebook group. Anyone live in San Antonio? Massachusetts? There are jobs in those locations! And remote jobs, as well!
Don’t forget the standing opps on my Find A Freelance Job article. 1099 and W-2 opps.
🎪 ‘Tis the season for summer vacations. What a blessing it is to interrupt a normal routine and go some place new. I’m grateful for all the places I’ve been able to go and that I have loved ones to share experiences with.
But whooo boy…vacations can sure feel like a lot of work.
One of the best ways I’ve tried to lighten the work of feeding everyone while traveling is to require that the kids be entirely responsible for cooking a dinner.
Allow me to explain.
It all started with one of my dearest girl friends and I taking our children on road trips together.
This tradition began with our families over 6 years ago. 2 moms. 5 quite young kids. And a very stuffed Honda Pilot SUV. The husbands are never invited because there is no room for them in the car. :-)
This mom and I have taken 5 road trips together. And we required the kids to completely prepare a meal on every one of them.
Just this past March we vacationed with another family to a cabin in New Mexico for spring break. There were 11 people total. We divided up the cooking nights as follows:
Moms cook
Dads cook
Boys cook
Girls cook
Here are some of the kid-friendly meals that even pretty young children could do:
Spaghetti, roasted broccoli, and garlic bread. Even the littlest one can slice a loaf of French bread and spread some butter on the slices.
Taco bar. Not a lot of cooking if you just do ground beef and a packet of seasoning. Maybe heating up some cans of Mexican black beans. But there are lots of “fixin’s” that you can have so that makes it easier for several hands to have a job. Cutting tomatoes. Cutting lettuce. Putting shredded cheese into a bowl. Sour cream. Perhaps reheating some frozen roasted corn. Doing some chips, salsa, and guacamole as an appetizer.
Pulled pork (cooked ahead of time at home by parents so they just have to reheat it, or possibly done by the kids in a slow cooker if they kids are a bit more advanced at cooking), boiling some boxes of macaroni, peeled carrots sticks, maybe some frozen French fries.
Grilled cheese sandwiches on a griddle, a couple of boxes of tomato soup, potato chips, and then a fruit salad with lots of different fruits that have to be cut up.
This helps the vacation to actually be a little vacation for the normally stretched parents. You can sit back and have a glass of wine or get some extended reading time or maybe play a grown up game of Spades.
Whenever young children are involved, I found they often got really into it. They would pretend it was a restaurant. Ask for special drink orders. Now they are more just completing the task, which is probably developmentally appropriate for their ages.
This isn’t about eating great food that particular night. You might end up eating some burnt garlic bread. But who cares! And eventually the young ones will get better the more they practice.
It is a great way to really reinforce the message that I wish more children would really take to heart – the universe doesn’t revolve around them! Vacations are for mom and dad to get a break, too!
Happy Summer!
🎢 I am starting to worry. Feeling uneasy about the direction of my firm. I rely on a lot of 1-on-1 trainings for FreshBooks users. And last week I had ZERO paid trainings. I checked my calendar 12 months ago and I had 7. That is highly alarming. I tell you this so you know running a business is hard. HardHardHard Hard.
🎢 I made a YouTube video that had 3 views in the first week. I mean, not a lot of folks watch my FreshNooks videos, but usually way more than 3 do! I feel like that must be that something is wrong in the settings of my FreshBooks YouTube channel, but I don’t know what changed. Ugh!
🎢 Kate, Yeesh! Let’s stop being so depressing! Ok..so here is some good news. April 30 was a 1-year milestone. I successfully published 12 monthly editions of an email newsletter for my firm. I can’t send you to the link to read it because I don’t want accounting professionals looking at it and messing up the algorithm. But I can show you the Google doc template that is the starting point for every edition. Because I knew it would be tough for me to come up with ideas for what to write about each month, I made the choice 12 months ago to make all the newsletters the same. This document gets duplicated and that is my starting point for each of the 12 editions I have written for my firm.
Is writing a monthly email newsletter a good idea? I don’t know. I feel like my personality and skills are suited for it. But I am mostly just celebrating that I did 12 months in a row with no skipping. I do believe that a decent part of my success is just not stopping.
I do know that I need to focus on getting NEW email addresses, though. Because it seems the list that I have might be slowly starting to NOT spend their money on buying my services. (Ok…I took it sad again...whomp, whomp).
⚡Who else is starting summer break? Want to give your child(ren) a job this summer? Check out my video about real work you kids can do for your firm this summer.
✉️So, y’all like it when I share my Google Doc templates, eh? As a reminder, I filled out this form as well. Just like I plank if I overthrow a softball, because I expected my middle school softball girls to plank until their partner retrieved the softball if they made a bad throw.
Thank you for the 3 month review template! Truthfully, I was derelict in conducting formal or regular employee reviews. - T.J.
Stealing your 3 month review! Having a review today with one of my team members and love a pre-made agenda! Kristen C.
Keep hustling!
Kate
-Chief Hustler-
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